Gordon Carfax’s troubles during a lecture when he suggested that Raymond Western’s MEDIUM device wasn’t contacting the spirits of the dead, as claimed, but that spirits were intelligences occupying the same space as ours but “at right angles” to it who’re posing as human dead for sinister purposes. His efforts to answer questions from an unexpectedly huge audience ended in a riot catapulting him into national prominence. He received two phonecalls in consequence. The 1st was from Western, offering to bring him to LA for a free MEDIUM demonstration, an experience whose $10,000 hourly cost was far beyond his salary as a Medieval History professor. The 2nd was from Patricia Carfax, a cousin he’d never met who claimed that Western had murdered her father to get MEDIUM’s plans.While Carfax debated accepting Western’s invitation, Patricia arrived. She explained the circumstances of her father’s mysterious death after he’d developed the MEDIUM prototype with Western’s financial aid & of attempts that had been made on her life, obstensibly on his orders, after she threatened exposure. Carfax decides to use his free demonstration to contact her father’s spirit & departs for LA & his 1st meeting with Western.Farmer has a solid storyline. Action is lively, characters credible, but the ending is sudden. The prose is adequate. Rough spots are few & far between. The final pages are perhaps the more disquieting because of the excellence of the page just before them & as a result of the sudden, jarring halt at which the novel ends, almost in mid-thought.The reader is quickly caught up in the protagonist’s problems & his well sketched antagonist, a capable villian indeed, who permeates the book with his power & charm despite the fact that he’s usually off-stage. This is, in short, a notable effort of the type that has made its author recognized as one of the finest, most thoughtful practitioners in sf.–Don Ayres (edited)